02 January 2010 6:47 PM

How sad it is to watch the British Government lecturing mighty China over the execution of a miserable drug-smuggler. What a pathetic issue to pick. I think people should be executed only for murder or treason, and then after a jury trial with the presumption of innocence. And the frenzied pursuit of drug-smugglers, when nothing is done about the criminals who take such drugs, is a waste of time.

But that’s the way they do things in China, where excuses such as ‘bipolar disorder’ and ‘I was abused as a child’ don’t make much impression on the judges, and where it is pretty well known that they put lots of criminals to death.

If you don’t want to be executed in the People’s Republic, my advice is not to carry suitcases given to you by strangers through Chinese customs.

We don’t maintain a Foreign Office to rescue idiots from the consequences of their stupidity. Nor do most British taxpayers specially object to the death penalty itself, which a lot of us view with much less horror than we view murder, and would like to see restored here.

So what is the Foreign Office for? Not much. On Christmas Day in Peking, the Chinese Human Rights activist Liu Xiaobo, a peaceful dissident of great principle, determination and courage, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for daring to campaign for political liberty.

I can find no record of any British official protest against this disgrace. We left the matter (as we leave many issues) to our masters in the EU, who mumbled a vague collective objection. I wouldn’t mind so much if we hadn’t intervened so vigorously over the drug-smuggler. But we did.

It gets worse. It is not widely enough known that Britain also recently sold Tibet to the Chinese, while nobody was looking. How much did we get in return? This betrayal happened in late 2008, when Gordon Brown sought Peking’s help in propping up the International Monetary Fund – part of his efforts to stem the banking crisis.

China saw our bankruptcy as its chance. For decades, it has resented the fact that Britain – having dealt with an independent Tibet in the days of Empire – insisted that Tibet’s position was special and different from the rest of China. This infuriated the Chinese leadership, who like to pretend that Tibet has always been part of their empire.

We do not know exactly what happened, but a few weeks after the IMF approach, the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, slipped an announcement on to the Foreign Office website that Britain had finally – after 60 years of refusing to do so – recognised Tibet as ‘part of the People’s Republic of China’. This is a total and unmitigated diplomatic defeat, and a warning of worse to come as we learn to toady to the new superpower.

Fake bravado over drug-smugglers should not hide the speed with which we are ceasing to be a serious or important country.

Air travellers are being punished for the failure of the ‘security’ services who claim to be protecting us from terror.

We now see how useless this expensive and self-important industry is. Not only did they fail to act on a specific warning about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab delivered by his own father.

They even knew that underpants-borne bombs of this type were being made in Yemen, because on August 28, 2009, Abdullah Hassan al-Asiri, who had also been in Yemen, used a near-identical device to try to kill the Saudi Deputy Interior Minister, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef.

While it makes sense to use more body-scanners (I have reached the age when I am quite flattered that the Government wants to know what I look like naked), the other measures in response to the Detroit incident are actually mad.

Maddest of all has been the ban on the in-flight maps that let us know how much longer we have to endure in the air. Why not black out the windows, and confiscate our watches and blindfold us, so as to be sure we don’t know where we are?

But denying pressurised, bursting passengers the use of the lavatory for an hour is a cruel and unusual punishment and a flailing over-reaction. Simple vigilance would be far more effective anyway.

Normal commercial flying is rapidly becoming a slightly milder version of extraordinary rendition.

There is also a question that never gets answered. How competent are these terrorists? How real is the threat? The would-be murderer al-Asiri managed only to kill himself. Abdulmutallab, like the shoe-bomber Richard Reid, couldn’t get his bomb to go off. The liquid bombers were caught before they could get near a plane. Could they really have built a workable bomb on board?

I have seen no knowledgeable discussion of this, nor heard any evidence that it could have been done. I suspect the spooks exaggerate the dangers almost as much as they exaggerate their own ability to defend us from them.

When I say David Cameron is a soppy liberal, and that the Tories are essentially the same as the other two anti-British parties, many of you get angry with me.

Will you believe it when your beloved Mr Cameron says so himself? I quote from his New Year message: ‘Let’s at least recognise the good intentions of our opponents. Let’s be honest that whether you’re Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrat, you’re motivated by pretty much the same progressive aims: a country that is safer, fairer, greener and where opportunity is more equal. It’s how to achieve these aims that we disagree about – and indeed between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats there is a lot less disagreement than there used to be.’

Speak for yourself, Mr Cameron. Many of us have had quite enough ‘progress’ and view green fanaticism with suspicion. As for ‘equality of opportunity’, didn’t that come from the grammar schools you won’t restore?

The crime rate on the Isle of Man is said to have dropped because the local prison has banned smoking. Would-be criminals simply can’t face the idea of months without tobacco, so they behave themselves.

It’s all so obvious, isn’t it? Anybody but a Left-liberal politician would understand the simple point here – that if you make prison life unpleasant and austere, fewer people will want to go to prison.

Will anybody on the mainland act on this? No – all three parties support the stupid policy of soft prisons, and cannot admit that they have been wrong for more than 40 years.

****************************************************************************************************************************Long ago, in a 2004 book, I noted the remorseless rise of the policewoman Cressida Dick, political correctness made flesh. I had thought that her part in the de Menezes disaster might have halted her advance.

But no, she is awarded a medal in the Honours List. What for?

My guess, in the absence of any explanation, is that it’s for being female and PC.